SUNSARI PRIVATE. BOARDING SCHOOLS CLOSED DOWN

Kathmandu, 19 Nov.: All private and boarding schools remained closed Friday to protest the abduction and murder of Raj Acharya, 9, of Dharan Thursday.
Two suspects have been arrested.
Over one dozen persons have been apprehended for questioning,
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5,567 ATTENDING TU CONVENTION





Kirtipur, Nov. 18 As many as 5,567 graduates are attending the 36th Convocation of the Tribhuvan University on November 23 this year, The Rising Nepal reports.
Office of the Controller of Examinations, TU, said the preparation for the convocation ceremony has been completed.
Students completing Bachelor, Masters, MPhil and Ph D degrees from the University will attend the convocation ceremony.
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Colombo will be the Chief Guest at the convocation ceremony, it is said.
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THE LAST PANCHAYAT PM

Kathmandu, 19 Nov.: :All these years later, Marich Man Singh Shrestha, the last prime minister of the partyless Panchayat system, continues to extol this quality of that polity: Where else could someone from his modest social and economic milieu rise to become head of government?, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook.
It wouldn’t take much to hear in Shrestha’s query the tenor of inadequacy many ex-panchas still express almost as an act of expiation. Hard as it might be to believe, there were people who were genuinely inspired to serve their nation under the banner of partylessness. Yet it turns out that every man or woman like Shrestha was outnumbered by those who believed they had the right to be served by the system.
The post-April Uprising spurt in published reminiscences of the period abounds in such sentiment. Take this gentleman who reached the pinnacle of political, administrative and diplomatic service. Doubtless, Nepalis today continue to benefit from his wisdom percolating across the media on diverse matters. In ruminating on them, there are times he appears to emphasize his own role in events all the while demeaning what he was representing.
Not that we couldn’t have tolerated personal aggrandizement from this esteemed personage, at least. A youth once seen milling around a foreign medical professional apparently impressed the benefactor sufficiently to find his mooring in higher education overseas. The country saw in him immense promise even before he had submitted the dissertation justifying the erudite honorific that was a rarity then.
Questions persisted as to when – or even whether – he ended up fulfilling that academic requirement. Then far intense speculation swirled around the true purpose of his ascendancy. But these things hardly detracted, as far as Maila Baje is concerned, from the extraordinariness of his personal story. But today condemnation of the system that seemed to have made all that possible tends to appear as an essential ingredient of his recollections.
Another gentleman recently revealed how one monarch had dispatched him to China on a highly sensitive mission. Nowhere in his tantalizing narrative did he seem to marvel at the great trust he happened to bear amid Nepal’s geopolitical vulnerabilities. Everything seemed to have been scripted to demolish the monarchy’s image in keeping with the prevailing political climate. The reality that the man reached one of the top rungs of the palace-led system, complete with its perks, remained buried in his story.
A few former palace officials continue to offer interesting details about how individual royals varied in their values, attitudes, needs and expectations. But for the most part, their musings have descended into a barefaced settling of scores. The holier-than-thou approach of advocates for rival palace camps has marred what remains of redeeming value for historians. How even the supposedly worst victims in individual palace secretariats ended up far better than the average stalwart retiree in the Singha Darbar wing of the civil service, especially in terms of providing for their family, is not part of the storyline.
Everybody was simply too good for the Panchayat system and therefore the polity simply owed them. It is this subtext that makes former prime minister Shrestha’s seemingly worn-out words all the more refreshing.
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Yadav hamstrung by such advisors

Kathmandu, 19 Nov.: mPresident Ram Baran Yadav might be busying himself by expressing “concern” over any and every issue whenever he meets political leaders of select stripes. The idea is to assert a role he really does not have. The Interim Constitution does not envisage an active president, or for that matter an executive president of any color. The 1990 constitution, once touted as the best in the world by the very leaders who continue to monopolize mainstream politics even today, provided for a constitutional head of state, Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Rreview..
Nepali Congress, CPN (UML) and indeed the UCPN (Maoist) wanted only a titular head. But here we have a president who by all his body language strives to give an impression that he is overly conscious of political developments with ample hints of an assertive role that could be aggravated in the days to come.
After a lot of weighing and consultation from all sorts of directions, Yadav decided to join the conclusion ceremony of the Shanghai Expo that drew record participation and record visitors. He did manage to get a photo-op with Chinese Prime Minister Wen, an event that his advisors tried to exaggerate out of proportion for the “significance” it carried.
The Chinese government is long on memory and records. It gave Yadav nothing more than a correct treatment, which is what the Nepali team should have expected. There was no reason to have expected something special. The absurdity of big talk by his staff members is laughable. During drinking binges, his advisors boast of the president having made a “big impression” on the Chinese.
Beijing is well aware of who are “whose” who. Some of Yadav’s team members proved to be a baggage that did not go well with the hosts. For example, two of his advisors, Surya Dhungel and Hari Sharma, joined the delegation. The baggage did not make a good impression. Their stand on ties with China vis a vis India was enough to create a wall of steel-like formality and nothing more.
Dhungel makes big claim and would like to project himself as an “intellectual” legal eagle, although his peers in the legal fraternity make unflattering comments on his knowledge and practical experience. This reminds one of how, shedding the decorum a nominal head of state’s advisor is expected to maintain, went around claiming loudly at various for a that the constituent assembly’s term could not be extended under the Interim Constitution. He told so to CA members, other lawyers and journalists.
Whether he should have made such comments might, to some, still be acceptable. But surely he should have resigned after the CA’s term was extended, i.e. if he had any iota of self-dignity and professional honesty. Likewise, even if he did not quit on his own volition, President Yadav should have ordered him to do so for making statements that proved not only worthless but also misleading.
Someone who gives the impression of trying his level best to manage things correctly and with public interest uppermost in mind, appropriate action against his own chosen advisor would have set a welcome precedent. But then Yadav shies away from such approach. For that matter, some the Nepali Congress leaders them selves are more than sore that the president “played politics” during the NC’s general convention that elected a new central working committee office bearers.
The president might have been an active NC member for several decades. However, once elected president he is expected to concentrate only enhancing the prestige and dignity of the high office of a head of state. Many NC members were disappointed when Yadav opted for known NC activists as his advisors drawing salaries from the state treasury. They wanted appointments to have been made solely on the basis of merit, and especially those with non-partisan bent of mind.
That at least three of the president’s advisors are neck-deep in NGO activism and the funds that they swim in as a result also negate the image Yadav would like to create for himself. Recruited as a regular lecturer at Tribhuvan University about two years ago, Hari Sharma, according to a political scientist, is a “director” of an NGO receiving funds from sources whose actual agendas are alleged to be dubious.
Rajendra Dahal continues to be the editor of foreign donor-supported “Sikshyak” magazine. Considering that Dahal headed the Press Council earlier, he would have been expected to first take stock of the situation as to whether a political appointee to a post paid for by tax payers should continue also as editor of a magazine. Under the circumstance, it would be too much, in our context, to ask for not seeking foreign money to run a magazine and yet calling oneself a professional journalist. “He is a lucky chap. Girija Babu favored him a lot and he has managed to get the best of all the world while others have contributed much more without any reward,” said a journalist who is close to Sushil Koirala, the newly elected NC president.
When an institution that is supposed to be above day-to-day politics cannot keep its own house in order, it would not be too disconcerting if the prime minister’s office also overlooked the credentials of its staff members who join office at the PM’s pleasure and are bound to quit the job the day the boss steps down. Madhav Kumar Nepal’s advisors are also wearing too many hats to do justice to the posts they hold.
In other words, the questionable practice in one institution complements a similar practice in another high office. Individuals indulging in such approaches find it expedient and personally rewarding while the institutions suffer.
A number of Western donor agencies, too, function dubiously. They have their own agendas and would be keen to fund the NGOs in which individuals close to political leaders are involved. An example would be quite a few Scandinavian agencies. The Swiss, by the way, also are known to function with a twist.
The late Ganesh Man Singh, a founding and venerated leader of NC, used to publicly say, “Caesar’s wife should not only be pure but also seen to be pure.” Singh died a disappointed leader on account of the some of his contemporaries in the party compromising principles severely. Had he lived today, he would have been no less disappointed. If anyone has doubts, ask former Prime Minister Krishna Prasad Bhattarai who distances himself from anything to do with Nepal Congress that he helped found more than 60 years ago.
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